poligion: Science and religion

where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Science and religion

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Chicago Sun-Times

Letter to the Editor

Greetings!

A recent writer to the Sun-Times, responding to a newspaper article noting that governor candidate Bill Brady believes that creationism could be taught in public schools, wondered why it is so difficult for some people to understand why evolution should be taught in schools and creationism should not. Let me explain why it is hard for me.

The writer posits a dichotomy between religion and science. This is not quite true. A religion is essentially a worldview, a systematic description of the nature of reality. Modern science purports to do the same thing..

The difference between religion and science is that religion believes that there has to be a god to explain the existence of nature and the nature of existence. Modern science has chosen to believe that everything can and must be explained by natural causes, which, of course, is a non-provable assertion. This is what is called ‘a leap of faith,’ when you act on something beyond what you are able to prove, the very reason why religion is so often considered subjective, arbitrary, and not worthy of educated minds.

Science is more than just a body of knowledge based on provable experiments. It has expanded its presumed area of expertise to encompass all of reality. Science is very good at things like observing, measuring, and calculating repeatable events, whether in a test tube or in outer space. It exceeds its proper limits and authority when it tries to explain non-repeatable, non-observable, unique events at the beginning of time or in the indefinite past and when it insists that random events given enough time can account for all of nature and life as we know it; when it insists that intelligence can and does arise from non-intelligence; that order can come out of chaos, by itself, and that irreducible complexity is just another event in the ho-hum day at the evolutionary office.

The term ‘Creationism’ is often used to describe a complete system of beliefs about the origin of the universe and human life, but strictly speaking it is just the acknowledgement that intelligence must come from intelligence, and that believing in a God who created all this makes a lot more sense than believing the universe is just the result of random chaos that acted contrary to the known laws of physics and chemistry to form the world as we know it. Creationism in this case is merely saying that:”in the beginning, God created.”

To assert that God didn’t create the world, that there is no need for God to explain the origins of life and matter, becomes in the end just as much an assertion about God as any religion. So in seeking to separate science and religion, it has essentially created its own religion. You can call it naturalism

Education is about learning the truth. You can’t learn the truth if you automatically exclude relevant information from the discussion.

Thank you.

Larry Craig